Association of Retired Faculty and Librarians of York University

e Annual General Meeting of ARFL will be held Friday, November 10, 2017 in the Harry Crowe Room at Atkinson. The meeting will commence at 11:00 am, with coffee and tea being served beginning at 10:30. In addition to reports from Executive officers, members will be asked to elect members of the Executive for 2017-18. As has been customary, the meeting will be followed by lunch and a guest speaker. We hope to see you all there!!!

In December 2015, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was released, containing 94 Calls to Action, some of which involve language. In this talk, I start with the Calls for Action, and then review what happened in the decades leading to these calls, focusing on government, Indigenous institutions, and local community initiatives. I discuss what it takes to effect change, and speculate on what the future might look like.

Speaker

Keren Rice is a University Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. She is currently Chair of the Department of Linguistics and served the past two years as Interim Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies, and she was founding director of the latter.

Keren Rice’s theoretical work is in the areas of phonology and morphology. She is concerned with variation in phonology, asking questions about markedness, contrast, and the role of universal substantive features in phonology. She has long been involved in research with speakers of Dene languages in the Sahtú region of the Northwest Territories of Canada, and she has contributed to the understanding of these languages. She has been involved in work on language revitalization, and has written on fieldwork and the ethics of fieldwork.